For Horkheimer and Adorno, disenchantment is the Enlightenment process of freeing the world from myth, magic, animism, and supernatural explanations by making nature predictable through rational and scientific knowledge. Drawing on a concept associated with Max Weber, they argue that disenchantment replaces the belief that natural objects possess spirits or intrinsic meanings with calculation, universal laws, and technical control. Its purpose is to overcome humanity’s fear of unknown forces, but it achieves this by treating nature as lifeless material to be classified, exploited, and mastered. Anything that cannot be measured or made useful is dismissed as irrational or unreal. Disenchantment therefore encourages instrumental reason, in which knowledge is valued primarily for its power to achieve predetermined ends.

Domination is the fundamental principle that drives the historical process of both myth and Enlightenment. It manifests as humanity’s effort to control external nature, repress its own internal nature, and perpetuate social hierarchy. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Enlightenment’s entire program is aimed at the total domination of the natural world. As they state, “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings” (2). This drive is not just a practical goal but the very foundation of rational thought itself. The authors contend that the abstract and classifying logic of Enlightenment is built upon the real-world experience of power, where the ruler’s physical and conceptual distance from the object of rule allows for its manipulation. The power to categorize and subordinate ideas mirrors the social power to command and subordinate people.

Enlightenment is defined as the advance of thought whose historical program has been to liberate humanity from fear and myth by disenchanting the world. The authors frame this project as a paradox, stating that while Enlightenment “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters,” the consequence is that “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity” (1). The core mechanism of Enlightenment is the subjugation of all existence to the standards of calculability and utility. It seeks to replace myth with knowledge, fantasy with formulas, and quality with quantity. Anything that cannot be reduced to number and function is treated with suspicion and ultimately dismissed as illusion.

For Horkheimer and Adorno, instrumental reason is a form of thinking concerned primarily with finding the most efficient means of achieving a given end. It focuses on how a goal can be achieved without critically examining whether that goal is rational, ethical, or desirable. Their critique is not directed at practical calculation itself, which is necessary for ordinary life, but at its dominance over every other kind of thought. When efficiency and usefulness become the only measures of rationality, nature and human beings are reduced to resources that can be classified, managed, and exploited. Instrumental reason can therefore make oppressive systems function more effectively while remaining unable to question the purposes they serve. It embodies the central paradox of the Enlightenment: Reason intended to liberate humanity becomes a means of domination.

Mimesis represents an archaic mode of behavior characterized by imitation, adaptation, and kinship with nature. It stands in direct opposition to Enlightenment’s principle of domination, which operates through distance, objectification, and abstraction. In the authors’ historical schema, magic pursues its ends through mimetic practices, which seek to influence nature by becoming like it, whereas modern science seeks to control nature by remaining separate from it. Civilization progresses by suppressing this mimetic impulse, which is seen as a primitive and dangerous regression. Enlightenment thinking taboos the kind of direct, unmediated knowledge associated with mimesis, favoring instead the classifying thought that treats objects as alien and controllable.

Despite its suppression, the mimetic faculty remains a latent and powerful force. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that it returns in a pathological form within enlightened reason itself. This tendency reaches its most destructive expression in fascism and antisemitism, where repressed mimetic urges are acted out. The persecutors compulsively imitate what they perceive as the gestures and traits of their victims, engaging in a perverse mimesis that serves the project of total domination.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, myth is presented as Enlightenment’s dialectical counterpart and origin. The book’s central thesis on this relationship is that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology” (xx). The authors argue that, far from being mere fantasy or irrational superstition, myth was an early attempt to structure reality, to impose order on a chaotic world, and to explain origins. It represented a systematic effort to report, name, and control the forces of nature, thereby establishing the foundations for the conceptual thought that would later seek to overcome it. Myth’s “principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition” (8), establishes core principles that the Enlightenment later inherits and radicalizes. For instance, the inescapable cycle of destiny and retribution in the repetitive cycle of nature defined by science.

Self-preservation is identified as the fundamental principle and driving force of enlightened reason. The authors posit that “[Baruch] Spinoza’s proposition: ‘the endeavor of preserving oneself is the first and only basis of virtue,’ contains the true maxim of all Western civilization” (22). This single imperative reduces reason to a tool for calculation and survival whose purpose is to serve the all-encompassing economic apparatus. All goals are subordinated to this drive, and any thought or impulse that does not contribute to it is deemed irrational. The autonomous self, or ego, is forged through this process; it is a product of the repression of instinct and the denial of nature for the sake of surviving and mastering the world. The journey of Odysseus serves as the archetypal model for this process, showing how the self is created through suffering and renunciation in the name of preservation.

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the logic of self-preservation is ultimately paradoxical, turning to self-destruction when the impulse becomes absolute and automated. They assert that “The self, entirely encompassed by civilization, is dissolved in an element composed of the very inhumanity which civilization has sought from the first to escape” (24). The subjugation of internal and external nature required for self-preservation leads to the alienation and reification of the individual.